The first smartphone came out in 1992. It was called the Simon Personal Communicator made by IBM. although people start calling them smartphones two years later. The Simon could send and receive faxes. The Simon also had a built in address book,calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock and notepad. The simon was the first phone that had telephone and PDA features in one device. The Simon sold 50,000 devices. The Simon had touch screen and came out 15 years before the iphone.
In japan the company NTT DoCoMo released their own smartphone for mass adoption in the country.These phones ran on I-mode which provided transmission speeds of 9.6 kbit/s. Unlike future phones NTT DoCoMo used cHTML(compact HTML). cHTML was used in favor of HTML for faster data speed for the devices. This device gave NTT DoCoMo about 40 million subscribers by the end of 2001. Smartphones were rare outside japan untill the Danger Hiptop produced by Danger Incorporated which had moderate success. Blackberry released its own phones and was so popular that amercians started calling it the crackberry. Nokia was doing well outside the US and Japan as well.
Before 2007 it was really common for smartphones to have a physical keyboard. In 2007 Apple Inc. introduced the Iphone one of the first smartphones to use a muilti-touch screen. The iphone was notable for its large screen and finger touch screen without the use of a pen or keyboard. The first android phone released a year after called the HTC dream, It also had a large screen but still had a keyboard. Later versions of android on-screen keyboards and Keyboards on android phones quickly became rare. Android is an open source platform created by andy rubin and was later bought by Google. Although android started off slow it gained like wildfire in 2010 and in 2012 it became the most used mobile OS and still has that title today. by 2010 almost every phone was touch screen. Android and Apple led to the decline of major mobile companies like Mircosolf, Nokia and Blackberry.